Second Thoughts on the L.A. Fires

[Denise]

by: Michael Pakaluk
https://www.thecatholicthing.org
Thursday, January 16, 2025


“Among mortals, second thoughts are wiser,” wrote Euripides famously. Our first thought when someone suffers a loss should simply be condolence; followed by silence and a prayer. But then inevitably we arrive at second thoughts: “He didn’t follow his doctor’s advice. What did he expect?” “Looking at the phone while driving.” “Yet another casualty of psychedelic drugs.” And so on.

Like everyone else, I am aghast at the loss of lives and homes in the Los Angeles fires, and I pray. But I offer some second thoughts.

First, I consider that the Getty Museum provides a standard, for how prudent persons with custody of valuables should act. They value their collection; they are aware that the city government cannot be relied upon to protect it, given periodic fires fanned by the Santa Anna winds. Therefore, they have cleared their grounds of brush, installed a sprinkler system, planted water-absorbing trees all around, made their roof out of fire-resistant crushed rock, and they keep on hand a team of over 30 employees, as an ad hoc private fire-fighting team.

Presumably, if they were unable to take such precautions, they would feel compelled to move their collection. Knowing what they do, if they did not move their collection, and it was destroyed, we should conclude that either they did not value the collection sufficiently, or they were imprudent, or they took a risk and suffered the consequences.

A similar judgment it seems must be reached about anyone who had the means to live somewhere else but chose nonetheless to accept the risk. Didn’t Our Lord warn about building houses on sand?

Second, I think of envy and its daughters. Not a few people, I suspect, have secretly been delighted to learn of the destruction of the houses of celebrities and the rich in Pacific Palisades. Why else do the lists of those houses serve as clickbait? But it should not be a surprise that we delight in the misfortune of others, because our society is rife with envy – much of it going under the name of “social justice.” And anyone who finds sorrow in the good fortune of the prosperous, which is envy, will take solace in the bad fortune of the prosperous.

From there, as Sts. Thomas and Gregory teach, it is short step to another daughter, hatred. The word “hatred” gets abused today, love often being called hatred. We have seen little of true hatred. But keep stoking envy, and the demon face of hatred will assuredly follow.

Third, I think of Bastiat’s windows and World War II. Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, as you may know. showed the fallacy of people who said it was a good thing if someone’s window was smashed, because that created work for the glazier. Indeed it did, Bastiat said, but do not neglect the unseen cost, the “opportunity cost,” which is where the money paid to the glazier might have been otherwise productively put to work.

I have not so far heard anyone foolishly celebrating the L.A. fires as a boon to the city’s economy. Let’s then take that wise second thought away with us and stop saying, for example, that blowing up cities in World War II was a boon to the world’s economy, lifting it out of a depression.

Fourth, I think yet again about World War II. “It looks like Dresden or Hiroshima,” many have said spontaneously. Yes, it does, or like 100 other German and 200 other Japanese cities we firebombed.

The LA fires may indeed be, as many are saying, “among the worst natural disasters in the city’s history.” But compared with the destruction of cities – homes, businesses, women, and children – which we ourselves chose to undertake, it is chump change. Father John Ford protested strongly against the bombings as they were taking place. Elizabeth Anscombe opposed the war because she foresaw the barbarity.

Yes, I know the counterarguments, the Japanese war crimes, their fanatical cult of the Emperor, the claim that civilians were combatants, and so on. And yet, God judges us, not we ourselves. We may be pleased with and convinced by our own justifications, but what if the God of those incinerated women and children is not persuaded and has judged against us?

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.” These words of Thomas Jefferson about slavery are etched into the wall of his Memorial. Could one look for a clearer warning? We cannot rule out that winds and incompetent politicians sometimes serve as secondary causes. Remember that Lincoln interpreted the Civil War as a secondary cause of divine justice, in words etched into his Memorial.

Fifth, is there any priest or any bishop who is going to proffer the wise word in the circumstances that none of our goods in this world are lasting? For Jesus, people gaping at the fallen Tower of Siloam was an occasion to teach them a lesson, about detachment and preparation for death.

Does it make any difference if a man loses his house, or his house loses him because he dropped dead suddenly from a stroke? The same catastrophe of the upsetting of one’s plans, and loss of all of one’s worldly goods, is suffered each day by millions. Can’t we learn something from the visible, patent, inescapable form which this takes in the L.A. fires?

I was edified when a friend once said, after his child had wrecked a car but was himself safe and sound, “It’s just sheet metal and glass.” Souls have been lost but the magnitude of the L. A. fire consists in its vast destruction of – well, just timber and other combustibles. Sometimes Christians need to show deliberate contempt for these goods.

“My friends, do not love what you see cannot long exist,” taught St. Gregory in his Gospel homilies, “amend your lives, change your habits. . .requite your evil deeds by your tears.”